But Braco Duff, in rage enough, He first laid hands on me; If death did not arrest my course, Avenged I should be. But dantonly, etc. I’ve led a life o’ meikle strife, Sweet peace ne’er smiled on me, It grieves me sair that I maun gae An’ nae avenged be. But dantonly, etc.” Burns, on his tour through the Highlands, probably learned the air and the tradition of how Mac Pherson, when in prison under sentence of death, wrote the song, sang and played it on the scaffold, and concluded by breaking his violin to pieces because no one would accept it as a present, and promise to play the tune over his body after his execution. Neither the old version nor the words of Burns have much of the ring of a lament about them, but both are in accordance with the notorious character of the man. Burns, by the way, perpetrates a rather curious Irishism in first saying Mac Pherson “Played a spring and danc’d it round Below the gallows tree;” and immediately afterwards making him say— “Untie these bands from off my hands And bring to me my sword.” How a man could play a spring and dance it round while his hands were tied, he does not take the trouble to explain. “ROB ROY’S LAMENT.” Rob Roy himself, the most celebrated of all the clan who had “a name that was nameless by day,” had a lament specially composed by his wife, Helen Mac Gregor, on an occasion when the family were compelled by the law to leave their fastnesses and take refuge in Argyllshire. Helen was a woman of fierce and haughty disposition, and, feeling extreme anguish at being expelled from the banks of Loch Lomond, she gave vent to her feelings in a fine piece of music, still known as “Rob Roy’s Lament.” “I was once so hard put at,” Scott makes Rob say, “by my great enemy, as I may well ca’ him, that I was forced e’en to gie way to the tide and remove myself and my people and my family from our native land, and to withdraw for a time into _Mac Cailein Mòr’s_ country—and Helen made a Lament on our departure, as well as Mac Crimmon himself could hae framed it—and so piteously sad and waesome that our hearts amaist broke as we sat and listened to her—it was like the wailing of one that mourns for the mother that bore him—the tears came down the rough faces of our gillies as they hearkened—and I would not have the same touch of heartbreak again, no, not for all the lands that ever were owned by Mac Gregor.” “THE MAC LACHLANS’ MARCH.”